Ian Hands-Portman, Manager of the School of Life Sciences Imaging Suite, created a set of super resolution confocal images which make up the background for the front cover of RSC Medicinal Chemistry. Ian explains further below how he managed to create the image:

The picture shows a colony of MRSA bacteria, taken on the School of Life Science’s Zeiss 880 Confocal microscope using the Airyscan detector. The orange spheres are the cell membranes the blue smudges are the loops of DNA that make up the bacteria’s genome.

Confocal microscopy relies on labelling the sample with fluorescent molecules, whether a genetic tag or a dye added in, these are designed to highlight specific areas of the cell. In this case the DNA is labelled with DAPI which fluoresces blue and a membrane dye that fluoresces red.

A laser spot is scanned across the sample building up a picture pixel by pixel. Conventionally we use a pinhole – literally a tiny hole that the light passes through to block all the blur and haze in the image, this improves our resolution but comes at a cost – the light we’re throwing out is out of focus but it still contains useful information, to get the best possible resolution we’d have to discard 95% of our image. When we use an Airyscan detector, we collect that blurred light and use a mathematical process called deconvolution to refocus it adding it back into the image and boosting the resolution to around one and a half times higher than we’d get by conventional methods. Boosting the signal doesn’t just enable us to get a sharper view of the cell – it also means we can use less laser power which means our cells don’t cook in the beam so quickly and we can follow living processes for longer. The article can be found in full at: http://xlink.rsc.org/?DOI=D0MD00174K 

For further information on the imaging facility at Warwick; Warwick Imaging facility